[SoftTalker]

I'd suggest: new accounts are read-only for at least a week. Then they can comment (rate limited at first, gradually relaxed) and vote, and then after some additional amount of time and/or karma they can submit a post. Maybe some of these mechanisms are already in place? Bots can probably game this too but drive-by bots maybe won't be patient enough.

[Barbing]

Immediate comment privileges are really important. Lots of examples, but to give a silly one, someone pastes their clipboard without realizing it includes their API key or their email. Good Samaritans should be able to say, "Hey, I just caught something."

And, as another commenter mentions, if someone shares your work, you should be able to comment on that thread without delay.

[VorpalWay]

This is the only reason I got myself a HN account: someone posted a link to a blog post of mine, and I happened to see the increased traffic on my VPS.

(And I stuck around after, a few posts are interesting enough. All the AI stuff isn't, and there is too much of that unfortunately.)

[3form]

You reminded me how infuriating it was not to be able to post comments on StackOverflow. Felt like getting those few upvotes required was taking forever, and all without ability to ask for clarification.

[Barbing]

Goodness that is rough, then they instantly own your posts where blanking edits are vandalism (obviously great for the internet, albeit at potential occasional individual cost).

[elaus]

It seems easy enough to circumvent: "We're launching our product in 2 weeks, so let the AI create and 'warm up' 20 new HN users so they're ready to shill".

It's really not a problem that can be solved easily :(

[mbreese]

If someone is going to put that much effort into to it, let them. I think the ideas here are to try to get some low hanging fruit to see if that works “good enough”. You’ll never block all AI generated accounts, but you may not have to and still have the desired effect.

But if someone wants to plant 20 new accounts, grow them out with karma votes, so that they can game the voting, there are probably other ways to detect that.

[intended]

The issue is that it’s not that much effort anymore.

We rely on friction for most of our social norms.

[sdenton4]

Any amount of friction reduces the amount of slop. What proportion of clankers are going to realize that they need to warm up the accounts two weeks in advance? Answer: a proportion that your never going to see with that barrier in place.

With a couple few layers of defense, you'll weed out almost all of the bad actors. Without strong monetary incentives for spamming, you also avoid most persistent actors.

[localuser13]

With enough layers you will also weed out almost all of the good actors. Normal people are busy and don't have time nor patience to jump over too many hoops to promote their cool new research, or to respond in a thread where someone linked it.

[heavyset_go]

Reddit has more friction to sign up or post while new or low karma.

The main subreddits will basically shadowban you until your account is aged and has more than X karma.

[ryandrake]

This is why I don’t create a Reddit account or post there: there are so many rules that dissuade new accounts. I don’t even bother to try.

[qingcharles]

Reddit is fantastic, to me. It's worth the struggle to get past the initial bullshit.

There are a lot of flaws, though. Their appeal system is very broken, for instance.

[qingcharles]

Which in itself is annoying, IMO. It creates a whole separate set of problems. You need karma, so people post in karma-farming subs to get a few crumbs. Then you get auto-banned from a dozen of the top subreddits preemptively for farming.

Reddit hasn't been as overrun by bots yet, for the most part, although how long they can hold out I don't know.

[pixelmelt]

maybe not overrun by spam, but the amount of bots I see on popular subs is definitely not 0

[intended]

You don’t have a choice.

We live with GenAI, and the human to bot ratio is now leaning in a different direction. The old norms are dead, because the old structures that held them up are gone.

This idea that theres “more hoops - losing participation” on this thread keeps assuming that the community is unaffected by the macro trends.

It’s weirdly positing that HN posts and users, are somehow immune/unaffected by those trends.

[basilikum]

Requiring accounts to be a certain age does not help and will only affect legitimate users. The slopsters will simply create accounts, wait a bit and start posting then.

Actually cross the will out. They are already doing this to avoid the green smell. This account replied to me today. 4 months old, but only started posting today. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BelVisgarra

Oh damn, that's the one who posted the AskHN about the verified job portal on the frontpage today. Either this is some chilling still in build up, or it's an actual human being with severe LLM slop impersonation derangement syndrome.

[christofosho]

Yikes. That account is like the epitome of LLM posting. It's a shame, too, because it makes me feel less inclined to read discussion on this forum.

[basilikum]

Yeah, unfortunately there are bots here that are much better at hiding that and even do language mistakes on purpose.

It's still a small minority of comments, but it's definitely getting a problem and just the chance — even if it's small one — of talking to a bot, rather than a human causes inhibition. Finding out that one has been talking to a bot is finding out you've been scammed. You invest time and human emotions into something for another human to read, even if it's just a quick HN comment, just to find out that it was all for nothing. It sucks the humanity out of it and thereby out of oneself. You get tricked into spending your valuable limited human social energy on soulless machines with infinite capacity of generating worthless slop instead of on other humans.

[cozzyd]

didn't even bother not using an em dash...

[1718627440]

If most people are like my on that topic, then they use HN without an account, until they want to post or comment something, then they try to find out how to create an account. If they won't be able to post or comment then, then they will just not create or retain that account.

I was able to have discussions where one party has significantly unpopular opinions. Such discussions are unique to HN, please don't kill them.